Nothing about the day ahead made me think that it was going to turn out to be as insane and hectic as it turned out.
I mean, it started with something relatively simple, which was me testing out the new outfits that Art had been working on. Frankly, I was very satisfied with the first one that I was trying out, though there was still a lot of room for testing out new renditions or versions.
"So?" Art asked, watching with a smile. "Do you like the new outfit?"
"It's…" Well, if I had to put it simply… "It's iconic, in its own way."
The suit itself wasn't too complex, given that I'd gone for the Superboy-inspired look. The first piece was a suit much like most superheroes sprung for, full body and covering my torso, arms, and legs. With a blue base, the arms and legs were black, and where the shoulders and hips met my torso, there was an outlined white line in the black. Centered on the chest was the familiar taijitu symbol.
Given that I didn't quite have yin yang release in actuality, I felt like a little bit of a fraud. It was aspirational, though, seeing as a lot of the jutsu contained within that subtype were absolutely busted and would be the kind of thing that all but ensured I never had to worry about outside threats ever again. Something to achieve one day, though not now.
Finishing off the outfit was a black, old-school bomber jacket, of dubious durability, and similarly dark fingerless gloves. It wasn't as if I was forced to be married with this concept of a suit, though. There were plenty of other designs that Art was just as happy to try and work on, even if I did quite like this current one.
Superheroes cycled through suits all the time. Hell, sometimes they had different suits for different occasions. I'd already been prototyping some theories for a kind of armored battle suit, some mix between Rudy's technological constructs and my derived chakra sciences. The actual economic costs, though, made it largely theoretical, like some of the more exotic puppet prototypes I'd had in mind.
Either way, those were problems for a future Genji to deal with. At the moment I was more than pleased with how the new costume had turned out. "I'm digging it, Art. Though if I've got any more ideas, am I free to shoot them over to you?"
"Of course," Art smiled, beaming my way as he slapped my back. "Just be sure to give me a little forewarning, eh?"
"Naturally. I'll be seeing you, Art. It's probably time to take this for a test drive," I mentioned, already waving a hand to create a new portal for me to leave by.
"Have fun!"
Flying through, I found myself in the skies over Chicago quickly enough, taking a breath of the crisp air as I let my mind settle. There were a couple of things I could do, admittedly, whether that be doing my usual patrol and rounds of the city to ensure that nothing was amiss or heading back to Guardians HQ to see if anyone was around. Most of the crew wasn't on shift today, but that didn't mean I couldn't find someone to shoot the shit with.
With that said, I didn't get much of a chance to do much more than stop a few petty crimes before Cecil's voice came through on my earpiece.
"We need you on mission-ready status immediately."
"Any particular reason why?" No preamble, no softening, just a blunt order. It wasn't as if the director was against that sort of thing, but if time allowed, he tended to be a touch politer. Which meant that whatever was happening was time sensitive.
"Things have gone hot with Omni-Man. Or are about to go hot. I'm working on marshalling the forces now and sending you Invincible's location now." Talk about things to make you pay one-hundred percent of your attention to what was going on.
I hummed, already beginning to activate my eyes. At this point I could cover the entire state and a bit of the land around it, which was a stupidly large radius to handle. Chalk it up to my alien brain working overdrive to process all of the sensory information that I was receiving all at once.
"Do we know if he's going to side with us over his father?" I pointed out. Invincible had seemed like an alright enough guy, and if he was even going to grow up to be half as strong as his father, a good person to nurture as a future superhero. But family could make someone's sense of right and wrong or priorities all sorts of twisted.
"If you grab him and bring him to the GDA, we're gonna try to ease him into the idea. Or at the very least sell it to the kid as a means of getting answers as to why his father did it. Hopefully, his mother can help with that."
That…seemed like it could work. It might also backfire terribly, and I didn't fancy the idea of getting betrayed by himat the worst moment possible. Yet I wasn't the strategy guy, and I was willing to defer to people whose specialty was social manipulation and twisting the truth around. They'd likely be better at this than me.
Like I'd always said since I first got here. Trust needed to be extended, even if I was hurt by it being broken after the fact. Someone had to be the first one to be brave enough to offer it forward, and more often than not, I happened to be hardy enough to survive the worst of it.
"Alright. Just send me the coordinates, or a rough idea of where he's at, and I'll try to find him." As long as he was still somewhere in the state, I didn't think that it'd take a tremendous amount of time.
"We're tracking him by his communicator. Here's the closest address we have for him…"
Closing in on the afternoon, it didn't take me very long to track him down. Or to find out who exactly he was hanging out with, either. The boy was in costume, with Atom Eve, as they probably presumed they were somewhere private in the wilderness. A privacy that was interrupted as I walked through a portal behind them, breaking up their conversation.
"Sorry, pardon me, hate to interrupt your talk," I hastily spoke up, smiling nervously at the duo. Both of them flinched at my sudden arrival on the rock formation they'd been perched on. "But I require Invincible. A matter of global security, stuff like that."
"And you need him only?" Atom Eve blinked a little surprised.
I blinked her way, remembering something I briefly recalled being mentioned during one of the downtimes in training at the Guardians HQ. "Didn't you stop being a superhero? If so, then it's really just an Invincible-related conversation." If things were so bad that we needed Atom Eve, I'm sure that Cecil wouldn't hesitate to bring her out.
The fact of the matter was, I didn't know her general weight class for her powers either. Maybe she could mess up someone like me or Nolan easily enough. I'd never seen that level of power from her, but I could be wrong! If it was limited to non-biological matter manipulation, then that really pared down the actual options she had for hurting him. Unless…
"I mean, unless you can make a nuke. Then we can talk. Can you make a nuke?"
"Pardon?" "What?" Invincible and Atom Eve spoke in tandem, both confused by my question.
"Can you make a nuke? Because if the answer to that is a 'no' for moral reasons or just complexity reasons, then your services are not needed at the moment." Even then, would a nuke be enough to kill me…?
Presuming I didn't just teleport away quickly enough or advance to FTL speed to avoid getting caught by it, then maybe? Perhaps if it hit me when I was at ground zero of the blast. Hard to say if it'd be enough for Nolan, either.
"No, I can't make a nuke! This is crazy, what are you even talking about?" Atom Eve almost shouted at me, with Invincible looking similarly confused.
"Just hand over the goddamn earpiece, kid,"Cecil sighed. Yeah, I wasn't doing a very good job of explaining why I needed him. A shinobi I was not, because active deception and deceit were not the most finely honed tools in my arsenal.
With a huff, I pulled out the earpiece and offered it to Invincible.
"What is this?" He asked, taking it carefully.
"Cecil's gonna explain everything. Your mom is with him, too."
"My mom is at the GDA base?" If anything got his attention, it was that, as he took the earpiece and put it in. "Cecil, what the hell is going on?"
While that conversation was ongoing, I turned to Eve. "...So. How's life been?"
"It's been, well, quiet. Quieter, I guess," she shrugged, glancing back between me and Invincible. "Are you sure I shouldn't, like, be involved with this or anything?"
"If things go horrifically wrong, then you're likely getting called in," I freely admitted to the redhead. "And if you want to prepare for that eventually, maybe get in contact with Kate or Robot and head over to the Guardian's HQ."
Her face twisted a little at the mention of Kate. "I'm not sure if I'm speaking terms with Kate yet. Did you know—"
"That she had sex with Rex? Yes, I know, but Rex was a bit of an asshole and didn't give her the full story on that whole situation." Pausing, I crossed my arms while Mark's volume raised in the background, practically yelling at Cecil. "Was it fucked up for her to bang your supposed ex so quickly after breaking up? Maybe a little, but I don't think it's the type of thing you cut ties with someone entirely over. Y'know?"
Maybe I've just got a pretty high standard for what goes beyond the pale in friendships. I counted Rex as one of my friends, tentatively, and he was still as much of an asshole as ever. Actually, I'd amend that, as he did seem to be getting a little better over the months, as he settled into the Guardians.
"People screw up. But I don't know if that means you've got to unperson her for the transgression. Or maybe it does." I shrugged. "It's your life in the end."
Whatever conversation or talk that Cecil had with Invincible seemed to be done. He had a restless energy in him as he handed the earpiece back to me, pulling his mask into place. "Alright. Let's go."
Giving Eve one last shrug and a smile, I put the earpiece back in. "That's time, Eve. I'd recommend coming to a decision on what I told you sooner, rather than later."
"We have other places to go. Allons-y, Mark!" I commanded, creating a portal and gesturing toward it.
"...Are you seriously quoting Doctor Who at a time like this?" he answered, looking at me incredulously.
"Everyone has their ways of dealing with stress. Irreverence is mine. Now c'mon, this isn't cheap to make."
He flew through the portal with an amused huff, and I offered the baffled redhead a final look before I followed him through. The two of us were right in the middle of the GDA headquarters underneath the Pentagon, and it only took a moment for a staffer to direct us toward the control room. Given that was where Cecil and Invincible's mom was, we made our way there posthaste, where they were waiting.
Cecil, to anyone who might not have had eyes like mine, looked as unflappable as ever. But there was a deep, singular tension wrought all the way through his body. Like a bungee cord that had been pulled so taut that it was about to break, and you just didn't even know it yet.
Invincible's mother, though, was not what I expected out of Omni-Man's wife. I mean, I didn't know what I expected, really. Some sort of Lois Lane to his Superman schtick, maybe? In hindsight that felt like something of a stupid presumption for me to make. Nothing about this world had seemed tremendously inclined to follow the stations that I'd expected.
Guessed that was the difference between a superhero world depicted in comics and one that was actually remotely realistic.
She was in her middle age but aging gracefully, in the way that humans did. Faint crow's feet at the eyes, skin that was weathered, things like that. Though, outside of her apparent senescence, there was the fact that she seemed a little bit frazzled. In her shoes, if my husband was waging war on what was functionally the entire world, I might have been a bit out of sorts too.
The moment that she saw Invincible, she immediately broke from wherever she was standing in the control room and ran to run into him. Crashing into her son and wrapping her arms around him, fighting off tears. He didn't hesitate to hug her back, showing that at least he gave a damn about the woman. My hope in him not flipping on us when it came time to confront his dad was at least rising by the minute.
"Mom, what's going on? What's all of this about? Taijitu came and got me, and you're here…" The boy was incredibly, unspeakably in the weeds about so much of this. And to be fair, it seemed as if a lot of people were in the loop for what Omni-Man had done but him.
If even his wife had figured it out, his son must have had some rose-tinted glasses all of these months. Then again, who wanted to believe the worst about their father?
"Your dad…he's…" She pulled back, mouth opening and closing, as she obviously tried to find the right words.
Cecil didn't have any reservation, filling the dead air with his own take on it. "He's gone rogue, and we need to try to stop him."
Invincible blinked behind his mask. "My dad's a hero. He's…he'd never do anything crazy like that!"
At a certain point, dancing around a subject just seemed crazy to me. You needed to go forward and just bluntly confront someone with the truth. No matter how much it might personally hurt you. I figured we might as well tell him the truth.
"Your father might be a good man," I carefully stated. "He might be a bad one. But all I know is that we have to work with the facts of the situation."
"Which are?" Invincible asked, reeling toward me.
"Your father killed the Guardians of the Globe. Not some mysterious murderer or hidden threat."
His face slackened with shock, hands balling into fists. "That's a lie! H-How do I know it wasn't you? Showing up right after he got put in the hospital is pretty suspicious, isn't it?" He leaned in closer, the tumultuous teenage emotions writ large on his features.
Debbie was the one who saved things from going well and truly nuclear when it came to her son. "Mark… he admitted it to me. He killed the GDA team that was at our home. He killed Donald."
…Huh. So his name was Mark? It suited him.
More centrally, the fact that Omni-Man had killed all of those other people was news to me. So far, I'd been assuming that there'd been some other disruption to the state of affairs that had Cecil in a panic. Not that he'd gone on a murderous spree already. Then again, that did make the sudden sense of urgency all the more obvious.
"Wait, what? When was this?" I asked.
"A few minutes ago," Cecil admitted, gesturing to someone in the room to bring up the footage on the screen. "Right before you arrived."
Whatever resistance that Mark wanted to bring up to the matter was crumbling in the face of hard evidence to the contrary. You could say that someone was innocent all you wanted. Literally watching them tear people apart, though, did a lot in making that kind of argument just fail immediately. Something was giving way in Mark, in the set of his shoulders, as he began to breathe faster and faster.
"Why…why…?" His hands were trembling, face locked onto the screen. "H-He's got to be mind-controlled, or…or someone's forcing him to do this."
"Maybe that's the case," Cecil granted, even if the way his eyes were narrowed didn't make it seem like that was probably what was going on.
"I-I want to try to talk him down," Mark pressed.
Cecil stared at him, hands on his hips, as his jaw worked back and forth. Whether or not he was fine with the notion was irrelevant. The fact of the matter was, Mark was one of the heaviest hitters we had at our disposal when everything was going awry. We were watching Omni-Man at this moment not looking for Mark anymore but traveling elsewhere, though they didn't have a current heading at his destination yet.
There was just too much on the line to not make the token attempt. "...Fine, kid. You get the one attempt to make him stand down. Then we'll force him to."
"Are we going for him right away?" I asked, feeling antsy already. That part of me, that dreadful anticipation to test myself against Battle Beast, was beginning to rear its ugly head once more.
"Not yet. Once we have a good idea of what his goal is, we've got a few assets that we've been preparing to try and slow him down or wear him out first," Cecil freely admitted.
Well, that did make me feel a little better about our chances to win.
Whatever Cecil was about to say first was interrupted by another voice in the room, calling out to the man. "Sir! We have, uh, contact that you're going to want to see."
"What now…" Cecil groaned, twisting around to look at the screen. Of course, what was there did manage to make his unflappable demeanor a bit shocked. "...What in the goddamn—"
In the flesh, looking incredibly, unspeakably furious, was a man whose funeral had been televised some months ago. Someone whose death apparently had been greatly exaggerated, as grainy footage of him appeared on the massive monitor. There flew the Immortal, one of the first Guardians of the Globe, formerly deceased, and looking like he was a man on a mission.
"Oh my god…" Debbie breathed, a hand to her mouth as she stared over at the screen.
"The Immortal is alive?!" Mark yelled, looking about as done with the day as could be expected. And it was barely 1:20 in the afternoon.
My throat was dry, because apparently everything just seemed to come together in a great, big mess all at once. "I, uh. I guess I should probably go figure out what's going on with that next."
"Provided that's not a clone, a villain hijacking his body, or something else, then that'd be smart," Cecil admitted. "He's angry, and I don't have to be a psychologist to imagine why. Or at who."
"Yeah," I conceded. "I'll try to calm him down, if I can. Do we have the coordinates?"
Cecil nodded. "They're up on the screen now."
Casting out my vision, to the stupidly far range that it could reach whenever I was actively concentrating on it, I could find not just Omni-Man, but also the Immortal. Heading to the first before we were ready was just silly. The second, though, could possibly even the odds for the fight to come.
"Let's hope he's in a talking mood…" I huffed, not willing to try my luck on the presumption. With another expenditure of chakra, I stepped through my black portal and out the other side.
Negotiations with a highly agitated person could always prove fraught with danger. When you were hopped up on all sorts of emotions, on the deluge of hormones pickling your brain and pushing you to rage, sense and rationality went out of the window. You didn't want to hear about right and wrong.
You just wanted to hit the first thing that was in front of you, and conceivably a threat. It was why I didn't take it too harshly when the Immortal immediately tried to batter me when I appeared in front of him, and inspected him up close and persona.
This was a man who didn't want to be calm. He wanted, more than anything else, to be boiling in the pits of a black and oily hate. Which was why the punch he threw was so easy to dodge, if only because I could tell he wasn't even throwing it at full power or with all of his concentration on it. It was also why I, instead of striking back, just continued to dodge.
"WHERE IS HE?!"
"I need you to relax for just a moment," I spoke, getting an incoherent roar of rage in response. That, and a few attempts to grapple with me.
None of which I allowed, though, as I ducked and weaved through his rage-filled swings with ease. If he were in his right mind, it might have been a bit more trouble. But he wasn't. All he had in his skull at that moment was anger, and nowhere to put it. As if all of his emotions had spilled out instead of trying to be used to more productive ends.
That didn't mean I was going to let him hit me. When he surged forward with a punch, I caught his hand and delivered a solid palm strike to the solar plexus, knocking the air out of his lungs and sending him staggering back. I didn't follow it up with anything after, though, as he choked and coughed while I fiddled with my earpiece.
"Cecil's on the other end of this line. You've just happened to wake up at the right time."
"W-What?" He hacked out, looking at me warily as he sucked in air once again. "Who are you?"
"Taijitu," I explained, gesturing to myself. "A new hero who arrived on Earth after your death. I work with the Global Defense Agency, though."
That news did seem to soothe him, if only incrementally, as he looked at me with a wary stare still. "And you work with Cecil?"
"For, with, pretty much," I shrugged. "He directs me to where the danger's the greatest, and I try my best to help people along the way. The guy's also better at explaining things than I am, so…"
Trailing off, my hand offered the earpiece to him again. The Immortal was still amped up, but he wasn't in a blind, murderous fury anymore. That was a change for the better, I suppose.
Carefully, and never taking his eyes off of me, the Immortal reached out and took the earpiece. Hovering within arm's reach seemed to have him on edge as he put it in before Cecil began to speak to him. For my part, I only got one part of the entire conversation.
"The Mauler Twins brought me back to life, somehow," he explained, working his jaw back and forth. "All while they tried to use one of those control collars to order me around. It was faulty, and I escaped."
That answered how he'd been brought back to life. I didn't know how badly his corpse was the first time around, but I guessed that it wasn't so bad that mad science couldn't put him back together. For a modern-day Frankenstein's monster, he didn't look that bad. Tired and weary, now that the hot flashes of anger weren't ruling his every thought, yet mostly like the pictures I'd seen before.
Listening, his expression did seem to firm up to whatever Cecil was telling him. "He killed us all, Cecil. With no warning or provocation, he butchered us, and I was the last one standing. You expect us to try diplomacy first after all of that?"
When he put it like that, it made complete sense that the right thing to do would be an alpha strike. At the moment I didn't entirely disagree. On the flipside, even with the countermeasures that Cecil was deploying against the man or the tricks I'd come up with, I wasn't sure about our odds against him.
Still. Even with multiple powerful combatants coming for Omni-Man at once, it might genuinely not be enough. All of the Guardians of the Globe had presumably fought him too, and it had hardly availed them much in the process. I didn't like diplomacy in this instance, but when the cost was potentially seeing this very messy fight spill out into populated areas…
Sometimes you had to make some compromises that you really didn't like.
A fact that seemed to deflate the Immortal, as I suspected that Cecil was telling him something similar on the other end of the line. Shoulders falling, but with eyes that were still simmering with rage and anger, the flying man could only grit his teeth as he stared off into the vacant sky. "...I understand. But I reserve the right to tell you that you were wrong when this goes awry."
Taking out the earpiece, he handed it back to me as I put it back into my ear. "So what didn't I hear?"
"Me telling him the situation, specifically Mark's insistence that we talk to his dad, instead of just rushing him."
"Yeah, alright, I can understand why he's upset."
"I hate it too, but if there's any chance for a singularly peaceful resolution, I feel like we have to take it," Cecil stated. I could hear the stress and spite he had for the admission clear as day in his drawl. The way he hated having to compromise. "I don't think it's likely, and frankly, you should be ready to beat him into submission. But you lose nothing by asking."
But he was a man who knew how to bend, unless a situation was so far beyond the pale that he'd break instead. This…this was a situation where a touch of bending would be allowable.
"I know," I admitted, feeling my own weakness more than ever before at that moment. "Doesn't mean I have to like it, but we don't have a lot of options, do we?"
"We don't," he confirmed begrudgingly. "Bring him back so we can give him a proper sitrep."
"Will do." With a modicum of focus, I opened a portal back to the command room and gestured to the Immortal. "After you."
He eyed it skeptically, giving me another sidelong glance. But the situation being what it was, and his own death might have made him more willing to take risks. Or perhaps the Immortal was just that willing to do what he needed to if it meant he was going to get to Omni-Man. Either way, he went through, and I followed after, entering into the command room behind him.
Which was dead silent, outside of the soft, murmured conversations and the electronic hum of the various machines spread around the room. Mostly because of the man who'd just entered the space dominating all of the attention.
People looked at the Immortal like they'd seen a ghost. Cecil, the staff in the crisis center, was just about everyone who had ever looked up to the Guardians of the Globe or seen them as an institution at one point or another. I'd come in later to this world, and I didn't have the cultural grounding or connection to their legacy to see them as more than another team of superheroes.
But for your average person, when the Guardians of the Globe showed up, it meant that their day was saved. The apocalypse would be abated, wound back, and there would be a tomorrow. I could see the shining hope in their eyes as they looked at the Immortal and tried to believe the threat we were dealing with could be dealt with.
I wasn't so enamored with the man to think that at all.
"Immortal," Cecil greeted, eyes glinting with something unreadable. His emotions to my Byakugan were just as complex, weaving between too many feelings to count before settling on a coolheaded neutrality.
"Cecil," the Immortal spoke back, that singular word carrying just as much weight and meaning in that moment. Before glancing over to the woman at his side, his features softening just a touch. "Debbie. It's…well, circumstances being what they are, I'm not sure if I'd call it good."
"I know."
He opened and closed his mouth and, in the end, settled for turning away from her. Whatever words he wanted to say that were locked inside of him might have been too brusque. Too colored by the experiences that he'd gone through in that moment. He chose to do the smart thing and turn to Cecil.
"What are we doing about him?" The Immortal asked.
"We've got three heavy-hitters here, and the hope that it'll make him stand down," Cecil admitted. "And if that fails…we'll try to force him to."
The Immortal's jaw worked back and forth before he gave a sharp nod. "Then let's get a plan together. Where is Nolan?"
"At one of our vaults," the director admitted with a frown, as the location came up on the screen. Another secured site, out in the middle of absolutely nowhere, and far from any populated areas. Not that it meant much with the speeds the superhumans here could move at, but still, it was better than getting in the mix of things over a well-occupied city.
"We've got the three of us if things go south, and all of my jutsu. And I've got a new trick that might be able to hurt him."
Cecil's eyebrows rose. "Such as?"
A grin spread across my face as I flashed pearly whites at him. "It's called Dust Release. And if I have a few moments unmolested, I can send an attack that destroys whatever it touches at the molecular level at him."
Maybe. It depended on how tough Viltrumite flesh was, because it had frankly never been tested in combat conditions. No time like the present to figure out if it was enough, right?
"...That might work." Cecil slowly nodded, much to Mark's seeming chagrin. "Let's run down what we know about Omni-Man's capabilities. We've got a few minutes. Time to see if we can make them count."
There wasn't a lot of time to make big, complex plans. Nor would I have trusted them, given the time crunch we were under. Most of our arrangements were such that we'd just, well, rely on what we could do.
Immortal and Mark were pretty similar in terms of powers, being functionally just flying bricks. All of my bullshit was where the fun really began, in terms of chicanery that Nolan couldn't expect. He'd only ever seen me use mostly ice, but I had a lot more at my disposal. So ultimately, I took up a position as lynchpin for decisive strikes against him, if it did come to combat.
Mark was holding out hope, but I don't think anyone else did.
Cecil bought us time, even as Nolan reached the facility and began his rampage. We knew that he was likely going there for something, but as to what…nobody knew. The GDA had so many goddamn skeletons in their closets and ghosts in their graveyards that trying to determine what precisely he'd nabbed was a fool's errand. All we could do was hope against hope that it wasn't a bomb or something else to go wildly scorched earth with.
We had a few moments before we were deploying out. Which was, of course, when the world's sense of dramatic timing meant that I was getting a call. Albeit from someone I genuinely did wish to talk to, as I noted it was from Rudy.
Rudy might be the best friend I've made since I've come to this new world of mine. While I wasn't sure about Cecil's strategy of keeping them in the dark, I did have a little bit of time to take a call. Not much, but enough to at least see what it was about.
Still, the timing left a bit to be desired, as I picked up the call. "Not a great time right now, Rudy. Can it wait?"
"Is it because you're going to fight Omni-Man?" Rudy all but shouted at the other end of the line.
Apparently the new Guardians of the Globe already knew more than I thought about the situation. They must have hacked the servers or something or rummaged through the GDA database. God knew that Rudy was smart enough to do something like that, the genius multidisciplinary savant he was.
"Oh. Well, if you already know that, uh, then yeah. I'm on my way to try and fight him." I said it with the faintest tremor in my voice, trying not to think about what was going to happen. Heroes ran into dangerous situations all the time. This was just…a touch more risky than the usual fare. "If I die, you're free to look at all my notes and theorizing. Won't be as good as me training you when you get your new body—"
"I'm already in it," Rudy interrupted, his voice choked up a little.
The news made me more elated than it should have. While the legacy of the Ōtsutsuki was one written in genocide and violence, I'd been excited to write them a new one. Create a world where the sight of someone like me wasn't a prelude to extinction, but the promise that rescue was right around the corner. That hope had just arrived.
Even if the worst happened, that promise and goal would still be alive.
"Really? Congratulations!" I wholeheartedly said, drawing some eyes from others. "I guess there's some good news out of the day, huh?"
"You should have told us," Rudy stated, his voice subdued. "W-We could have helped. We could have…"
"Died? Horribly?" All that came out of me was a grunt, because considering all of the people I'd come to consider friends getting slaughtered didn't sit well with me. "You guys are strong. But Omni-Man is in a whole different league than most of the current Guardians of the Globe. It was either this or feeding my friends into a meat grinder."
Unless there was literally no other option, I wouldn't do it. I couldn't do. Whatever cold calculus that Cecil had to ultimately sacrifice people, I didn't have that in me. Ending a threat decisively was one thing. What he could do and not lose a wink of sleep over…
The guy was inhuman in a way very different from me. You probably needed to be if you made it to a job like his.
Rudy was quiet on the other end of the line for a bit. I could practically hear his thoughts racing as he tried to find his words. Until one thing escaped him. "Try your best to win. And… find out why he's doing this."
"I haven't lost a fight since I've come to this planet, Rudy. I don't plan on starting now." With that, I hung up and let out a long exhale.
For the moment, though, all I could do was more or less just settle my nerves as the rest of the group looked my way.
"Finished with your little pow-wow?" Cecil asked.
"Yeah."
"Good. We've got movement coming out of the base. It's showtime."
At those words, Mark got seized in a final hug by his mother before she reluctantly let go. Whispering something to him, I turned away and let them have their moment. The Immortal was grimly determined, popping his neck and trying to calm his own breathing. Judging by the flinty, angry glint in his eyes, it wasn't working too much.
Then again, a touch of rage might be better if this did devolve into a fight.
At a certain point there were no more words to say. All that was left was for me to make a portal and for the three of us to fly through, immediately finding ourselves in the middle of a vast plain. Somewhere in the middle of the Midwest, my eyes told me. And coming out of the gloom of the ruined and wrecked facility was our target.
Unlike the other two people who were with me, I didn't have years of experience with Omni-Man, Nolan, whatever the hell you wanted to call him at this point. I didn't have a wealth of years fighting alongside him, only to be suddenly betrayed out of the blue. Nor was I his child, trying to come to grips with the violence that my father had suddenly begun perpetrating out of the blue. So it wasn't as if I had seen him in all kinds of different conditions, whether that be tired, happy, sad, or whatever.
Still… I thought he looked better than I'd like in that moment.
Cecil had spoken of countermeasures being deployed, and we'd even have the privilege of seeing some of them in action. My puppet, for as simplistic as it was as a souped-up prototype, had even slowed the man down. But that didn't mean much in the grand scheme of things when he didn't have so much as a mark on him. If it wasn't for the fact that I'd literally seen a bit of blood drawn, I wouldn't have believed he'd been hurt at all.
He hung there in the air like an invincible god, and the potent swell of physical energy that made him up metaphysically had never seemed like more of a threat than in that moment. There was something underneath his arm, too, and judging by the laundry list of bad stuff that Cecil had described as being kept in that facility, I also had no doubt that he was more than willing to use whatever he had.
Or at least to try and threaten us into compliance by the fear of it. Going for mutually assured destruction if he didn't like how a fight was going. We knew so little about his motivations for all of this, outside of conjecture and guesses. It made it impossible to presume what he actually wanted.
So I opened my big fat mouth and gave peace a chance.
"I don't suppose we can try to get you to surrender peacefully, Omni-Man?" I spoke, trying not to sigh as the Immortal glared daggers at him. Whatever peace we were trying to broker wasn't helped by his unbridled hostility.
Which. Y'know, I got it. If someone murdered me, I'd be angry about it too.
"We've gone a bit past that, Taijitu," Nolan said, something weary in his eyes as he stayed uncomfortably still in the air. Reading his emotions didn't give off any immediate hostility or intent to attack. But that could change on a dime. "But it's not too late for you to leave this planet."
"Something tells me the comfortable life I've carved out here wouldn't survive either way. Even if I left, I'd still be a loose end, one way or another." Presuming that Nolan was a lone actor in all of this and not a representative of his state. Running was theoretically an option, maybe, if I knew anywhere that was occupied in space besides Mars.
And apparently Martians were mostly assholes, so… "I've made my peace with what I've chosen."
Nolan nodded at me, eyes flicking toward the burly man at my side. "So be it. And Immortal…"
The Immortal didn't give him a chance to find his words, not when he could preempt him and spit vitriol all the while. "You think that I'd run away or stand down? After everything you've done?"
"I was going to say that you should have stayed dead." Nolan corrected the man with the same tone that you'd use to tell someone about the weather or give them the time. "Killing you again won't bring me any joy. For what it's worth, it didn't the first time either. With any of you."
"Dad…" Mark trailed off, positively poleaxed by the words that were coming out of his father's mouth. Out of everyone, he might have been the one I pitied the most. "What are you doing? Why are you doing this?"
For a second, it looked like Nolan might have answered the boy. Given him a reason, any reason, as to why all of this had happened. Yet his features firmed with determination as the man looked at him carefully. "...Just stay out of this, Mark. I'll explain everything when we're finished."
Things happened very quickly after that. Even for someone as fast as me, as strong as me, with a perception and reaction time like mine.
I had thought that I had a pretty good idea of how fast Nolan could move or how quickly he could react to things. When he dealt with the Flaxans, it'd been fast, but I hadn't believed that it wasn't something that I couldn't have done if given the opportunity or drive to just be that brutal about it. That must have been a very kind, quiet lie that he'd allowed the world to believe, because here and now I was learning the truth.
When he threw whatever it was that he was holding, there was a whipcrack as it broke the sound barrier. A smooth, practiced motion, as he exploded from complete stillness to sudden violence in under a second. I twisted to match it, to try and dodge, expecting at least a modicum of warning with my eyes. That wasn't the case, even as I was reading his emotional state.
Battle Beast's emotions were bestial, much like the man himself. They raged and roiled like the tides of an angry, tumultuous sea, flooding to extremes, even while the glint of tactics and intelligence came through his fighting style. With Thokk, I knew where I stood and where his emotions or thoughts generally lay.
With Nolan, that wasn't the same. In fact, he was relatively placid, determined to be sure, judging by his emotions. But not angry, or upset, or any real flicker of emotion that usually preceded violence. That was what got me: how quickly he flicked from that cool lake of surety to something far more homicidal the moment hostilities began.
Either he was a monster in more ways than one, or how he felt about the matter of this fight was all over the place to begin with. Whatever the reasoning was, the end result was the same. I got socked in the chest with the hard end of some kind of stone masonry, and I barely got a chance to note the unique energy signature tied to it.
After all, my entire existence became nothing but the bright, fiery orange of flame before I disappeared.
"TAIJIT-!" My communicator spoke, cutting out as Cecil tried to get my attention, failing before the connection was cut.
When I opened my eyes again, I was not anywhere I could recognize. If anything, a few things stood out to make it painfully clear that I wasn't on Earth as I understood it anymore. Certain immediate elements that were undeniable to my superhuman senses, as I pulsed a wave of chakra to inspect my surroundings with the Byakugan.
For starters, there was a ceiling here, of rock, tied up with some preternatural force or energy that my eyes couldn't quite identify. Or the fact that the environment around me was a hellish landscape of platforms, miles of caves and cavern networks, and molten rivers of lava that ran almost endlessly.
The most notable thing, though, was the fact that the place was positively saturated in natural energy. Just being here for any length of time made the presence of it painfully obvious to me, though thankfully I wasn't actively trying to absorb it or use it to send senjutsu chakra. Not that it made me any more baffled to notice it.
Wherever this was, it wasn't anywhere on Earth that I had managed to see so far. I didn't think I was off the planet, unless whatever Nolan had chucked at me was a kind of weird teleportation beacon. Either way, letting the man go free when he'd apparently decided to go completely mask off was a bad idea. I had places I needed to be, and I needed to be there yesterday.
So with another expenditure of will, I opened a portal to where I'd just been. And then for the first time since I'd come to this planet, an uncomfortable thing happened to me. The portal failed, flickering and sputtering out instantly on the spot.
"Oh fuck."
The panic hadn't begun to set in, but I could feel the impulse to do so at the back of my throat, itching to get out. Once more, I tried to create a portal back to somewhere I recognized, Guardians HQ, only to get another failure of an attempt. It wasn't as if it was my side of the equation that was failing, too.
Hell, I even put up a hand to my earpiece. "Cecil? Anyone from the GDA getting me?" The line, no matter how persistently I tried to reach anyone on the communications network, just wasn't working.
Something about the local environment just wasn't particularly friendly to my brand of transportation. Or maybe it just was very, very persnickety about letting in any random spatial manipulation go on? I didn't know, but all I knew was that Omni-Man was back there, and I was stuck here, without the faintest goddamn clue of where I was or how to get back.
Worse yet was the fact that I was fairly certain that my attempts at reaching the GDA were stymied. Given that the range was global, that was something to be deeply concerned about. Maybe it was just because of my underground location not being particularly ideal for reaching anyone, but I didn't feel like that was the answer.
All while my stupid, idiot brain immediately began to conjure the worst-case scenarios.
Would Cecil deploy the Guardians of the Globe? At a certain point he'd have no choice but to, if only to buy even minutes against Nolan. I liked Cecil; he seemed like the type of guy that, as long as you were a straight shooter with him, wouldn't throw you into a slaughterhouse and would treat you fairly. But if the situation required it, if he needed to measure your lives against humanity as a whole…
Well, I didn't want to force him to make that calculus. To measure the value of the new version of the Guardians and the survival of humanity. Depending on whatever it was that Nolan wanted, or needed, from Mark and the world as a whole.
The only thing that mattered now was trying to figure out a way out of this place, while there was still a world left to save.